Bob Rogers

Bob Rogers from Carmel, New York, USA. Influenced by his father as a child Bob grew his interest in photography and now works in both photogravures and image transfers.
From: Carmel, New York, USA.
Shows: Photogravures and image transfers.

Bob Rogers’ father was a cultured man and an amateur painter. On Sunday afternoons when Rogers was a boy, his father would take him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and they would walk through the galleries and Rogers would listen as his father identified all the painters from a distance.“That’s a Seurat,” he would declare as they entered the Impressionist gallery. “And that’s a Monet!”

It was a kind of target practice for him—the further away from the painting he was when he identified it, the greater his achievement. The two would then go up and read the label and confirm his marksmanship. This was repeated from gallery to gallery, across the timeline of western civilization.

Bob’s father was also an amateur photographer. Naturally, when he was growing up Rogers was interested in taking pictures, too, and from time to time his father would let him snap off a couple of shots. He used Kodachrome and would most often take pictures when they traveled. When he first offered him the chance, young Bobs natural inclination was to make an image of a view that he had seen and liked.

“Not so fast,” his father admonished him.
Bob’s father explained that anybody could take an empty view, but that it was a pointless waste of film to do so—just buy a postcard and save the film if you wanted a keepsake. No, he said, the point of being able to make your own photographs was to be able to include some familiar person in the picture. He then proceeded to insert himself into the scene. With this small, but important correction he knew he had made his son’s resulting photograph both “unique” and “memorable”.

Bob has disliked his father, but been interested in the nexus between snapshots, postcards and traditional European easel painting ever since. As such, alternative processes, which evolved as a means for nineteenth century Pictorialist photographers to advance claims for Photography’s traditionalist, Academic aesthetic merits, is the perfect vehicle for that exploration.

“These are images I have collected on my journey—an odyssey of the mind, of relationships, of locations—snapshots and postcards collected and sent home—a scrapbook of what I have seen and cared about.”

About the process: At present my work with alternative processes falls into two areas: photogravure utilizing photopolymer plates and a color, image transfer technique that utilizes pigmented inkjet inks. I have developed a variant of the traditional dry image-transfer process that allows me to transfer water-based inks into an acrylic matrix to create color images with a unique fresco-like surface as well as enormous archival stability.

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